Top Writing Life Quotes

From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: "There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on th...

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashi...

You never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write.

Some days being a writer consists of telling yourself you aren't insane, your characters are.

Everything is research.

I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

Too many stories. Not enough Tim.

Well-developed characters will ruin your writing plans every time. You may think you know where you're going with a story, but they have other ideas.

You always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself. Glinda the Good Witch

Live to write. Write to inspire. Inspire to write.

However, just like any line of work, writing is a negotiation, and creative control is as elusive as financial stability. I discovered that writing could be like cleaning carpets or working in a facto...

The most important trait of a writer is an authentic voice. Writers have to have faith in their own voice, and their own way of doing things. Originality is the gem that every writer possesses. Origin...

Writing is a 24/7 job. You live it, eat it, breathe it... the pay can be pretty lousy, but you do it happily, because you love it!!! That, and from the day you started writing the voices in your head...

There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our wor...

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

I must write now and quickly, before I begin to prefer the perfect version that lives in my head.

We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if yo...

Writing is my life. Life is my hobby.

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read le...